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exiled and even her children taken into custody. All this while her husband ignored her and
     took to carousing with his favourite adviser, Sir Hugh le Despenser.
    Many women would have been broken by such cruelty, but not Queen Isabella. Baldwin reckoned that at the heart of her there
     was a baulk of English oak, resilient, impervious, unbending. She grew more resolute with every setback, he thought. For all
     the hardship and the sadness which it must have brought to her, still she acted like a Queen. There was no apparent rancour
     in her spirit as she conducted her embassy with the French King. King Charles IV, her brother, was a man of great intellect
     and enormous cunning, Baldwin felt – but he tended to feel that about any king. Men with such enormous power were best avoided,
     in his opinion.
    She was here today, sitting at her chair, listening to the music with enthusiasm as the players cavorted, her eyes sometimes
     straying to the little boy who sat at the back with the covers for the instruments, discarded along with the musicians’ paraphernalia.
    To Baldwin’s relief the lad was playing quietly with a ball and causing no trouble. He was the adopted son of Ricard of Bromley,
     the musician with the gittern, and seemed content enough with his life just now. That itself was good to see.
    Baldwin glanced across at his friend of so many years, Simon Puttock. A tall man, some ten years younger at nine-and-thirty
     or so, Simon was a strong man, used to long hours in the saddle. He had been a bailiff on Dartmoor, responsible for upholding
     the King’s peace on the moors. His grey eyes were set in a calm, sunburned face and had seen their share ofviolence in over ten years of trying to seek out felons. His reliability had led to his promotion to the post of officer of
     the Keeper of the Port of Dartmouth, but the reward had been bitter, as it meant leaving his wife and family behind.
    And now he did not even have that post, for his Patron, Abbot Robert of Tavistock, had died, and arguments had arisen over
     the abbey’s choice of successor. Simon had no idea what his job would be.
    Baldwin’s face twisted wryly. Unlike him, he thought. His own position was fixed: he was the Keeper of the King’s Peace, a
     Justice of Gaol Delivery, and most recently, a member of the king’s parliament, a council which even the king distrusted.
     He only used it to raise revenue.
    For Baldwin, such a post reeked. He had been a Knight Templar, a member of a holy and honourable order, which had been attacked
     by an avaricious French king and his partner, the Pope. The Templars had been destroyed by those two, to their dishonour.
     Baldwin had been fortunate enough not to be in the preceptories when all were arrested, and was never caught. Yet the experience
     of seeing the persecution and deceit had left him with an abiding hatred of politicians and the clergy. He could trust neither
     entirely. Only his friend Simon seemed absolutely trustworthy.
    Simon was now standing at the other side of the room – naturally all those in the chamber here listening with the Queen, the
     knights, the men-at-arms, the ladies-in-waiting, were all standing; none might sit in the Queen’s presence – and was stifling
     a yawn. Baldwin felt his own jaw respond, and vainly attempted to conceal it, sensing his mouth puckering like an old hag’s
     who had bitten into a sloe, before he managed to cover it with a forearm.
    The Queen displayed no such weakness. She remainedupright in her chair, listening with every indication of enthusiasm, as though all the tribulations of the last months were
     dispelled by the music, hard though Baldwin might find it to believe. And yet, he knew, for much of the time, she was bitter.
     She concealed her anger at, and detestation of, Despenser, the principal architect and cause of her misery, but for Simon
     and Baldwin, who had grown to know and understand her moods and behaviour in the last few weeks of